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Ward of the State;The Gap in Ella Fitzgerald's Life

ELLA FITZGERALD sang jazz in a voice so pure and perfected that it admitted no pain -- and America loved her for it. In her sound we soared over the darkest passages of our nation's history, to a place where race and class lost all dominion.

Yet the public never knew the full measure of her accomplishment, because for over 60 years she kept the cruelest chapter of her own history a secret: her confinement for more than a year in a reformatory when she was an orphaned teen-ager.

The unwritten story survives in the recollections of former employees of the New York State Training School for Girls at Hudson, N.Y., and in the records of a government investigation undertaken there in 1936, about two years after Miss Fitzgerald left. State investigators reported that black girls, then 88 of 460 residents, were segregated in the two most crowded and dilapidated of the reformatory's 17 "cottages," and were routinely beaten by male staff.

At a time of renewed calls for institutions to rescue children from failed families, this lost chapter in the life of an American icon illuminates the gap between a recurrent ideal and the harsh realities of the child welfare system.

Like Miss Fitzgerald, most of the 12- to 16-year-old girls sent to the reform school by the family courts were guilty of nothing more serious than truancy or running away. Like today's foster children, they were typically victims of poverty, abuse and family disruption; indeed, many had been discarded by private foster care charities upon reaching a troublesome puberty.

When Thomas Tunney, the institution's last superintendent, arrived in 1965 and tried to bring back former residents to talk to the girls of his own day, he learned that Miss Fitzgerald had already rebuffed invitations to return as an honored guest.

"She hated the place," Mr. Tunney said from his home in Saratoga Springs, where he retired some years after the institution closed in 1976. "She had been held in the basement of one of the cottages once and all but tortured. She was damned if she was going to come back."

Not in the Choir

A more generous image of Miss Fitzgerald's experience there was painted by E. M. O'Rourke, 87, who taught English at the school in the 1930's and remembers Miss Fitzgerald as a model student. "I can even visualize her handwriting -- she was a perfectionist," she recalled. There was a fine music program at the school, she said, and a locally celebrated institution choir.

But Ella Fitzgerald was not in the choir: it was all white.

"We didn't know what we were looking at," Mrs. O' Rourke said. "We didn't know she would be the future Ella Fitzgerald."

She did sing in public at least once while she was at the reformatory, according to Beulah Crank, who later worked as a housemother there. Mrs. Crank, 78, said she was with her parents at the A.M.E. Zion Church in Hudson the day Miss Fitzgerald performed with a few other black girls from the school; she would have been no more than a year away from her legendary victory in a talent contest at Harlem's Apollo Theater.

"That girl sang her heart out," Mrs. Crank remembered.

Gloria McFarland, director of psychology at the reformatory from 1955 to 1963, found Miss Fitzgerald's record in the musty files. "She was a foster care kid when she came," said Dr. McFarland. "She was paroled to Chick Webb's band." Later, the institution's old juvenile records were destroyed by order of the state.

All her life, Miss Fitzgerald was intensely reluctant to talk about her past. As recently as 1994, when this reporter first stumbled on evidence that she had been at the school, Miss Fitzgerald kept her silence.

The silence left a mysterious gap in her obituaries when she died June 15. But her history can now add a cherished face to an often abstract debate about other people's children.

Abused by her stepfather after her mother's death in 1932, Ella Fitzgerald was taken in at 15 by an aunt in Harlem -- the equivalent of today's kinship foster home, but without the financial support. The girl who had excelled in her old Yonkers school dropped out to scrounge for money; she ran numbers at one point and worked as a lookout for a "sporting house," knocking on the door in warning if the police were around.

Her most recent biographer, Stuart Nicholson, has surmised that the authorities caught up with her and placed her in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale. It was after running away from the orphanage, he suggests, that she found her lucky break in show business.

Out of Room

But the Riverdale orphanage -- the only one open to black children -- was overwhelmed as the Depression converged with the great migration of poor blacks from the rural South. With so many younger children in need of a bed, a runaway teen-ager was a perfect candidate to send on to the state reform school.

The institution at Hudson, near Albany, had opened in 1887 as the House of Refuge for Women, the first state reformatory targeting unwed mothers. In the "home-like" brick cottages, discipline meant solitary confinement on bread and water, shackles and beatings. Later, the mission changed to younger girls loosely defined as "wayward," "incorrigible" or "in need of supervision." But the solitary confinement and abuse remained endemic. The buildings now house a men's prison.

"Institutions at their best are no damn good, and I'm old enough to see the pendulum swing back," lamented Mr. Tunney, who closed the "punishment cottage" but found himself reintroducing some of the old practices in a "behavior modification unit."

Like many adolescents leaving the foster care system today, Miss Fitzgerald lived hand to mouth after she left Hudson.

"You ask me how did she eat," Charles Linton, a singer with Chick Webb's orchestra, has said of the gawky, unwashed girl who was dancing for tips on 125th Street until he persuaded the band leader to let her sing with them. "She lived with people she talked to, and she ate with them, she slept wherever she could."

Still shy of 18, she was officially in state custody. Today, we would call her homeless. Her "parole" to a band performing at the Savoy Ballroom was only formal sanction for what she found by her own extraordinary talent and luck.

If she was almost lost to us, how many like her have been?

"How many Ellas are there?" Mr. Tunney asked. "She turned out to be absolutely one of a kind. But all the other children were human beings, too. In that sense, they are all Ellas."